From Participatory Disinformation to Deep Fake - Will 2021 be the year the truth dies?

Did Joe Biden win the 2020 presidential election? In America it seems to depend on who you ask, so effective has Donald Trump’s disinformation campaign been. Putting politics aside (increasingly hard to do in these polarising times), from a communications perspective, Trump’s team has been remarkably consistent in sowing the seeds of doubt about voter fraud.

Who leaked the phone call between Trump and Georgia election officials, just days before the Georgia run-offs? Logic suggests it was the Democrats. But after reading this fascinating and somewhat disturbing article on America’s disinformation crisis by Lois Beckett in The Guardian, I think it could as easily have been the Trump camp, effectively sowing the seeds of doubt about what is true - reinforcing to its supporters that there was fraud in Georgia the first time around, and so expect there to be again.

Beckett notes that Trump has embraced ‘participatory disinformation’, quoting Kate Starbird, a University of Washington professor, as saying:

“Trump didn’t just prime his audience to be receptive to false narratives of voter fraud, he inspired them to create them…and then echoed those false claims back at them. Participatory disinformation might actually be ‘stickier’ and more effective than ‘top-down propaganda’, in part because of the ‘positive reinforcement’ of Trump supporters seeing their ‘discoveries’ repeated by their media and political celebrities.”

Beckett references several communication experts and academics who reinforce that trying to fight disinformation with facts rarely works, because (my key take-outs):

• Disinformation is sustained by personal relationships. We trust our friends and communities of like-minded people. Which makes it easier to spread disinformation via social media networks.
• We have an emotional relationship to information, not a rational one, so repeating facts (as we see them) doesn’t account enough for the emotional perspectives (and prejudices) of those we are communicating with.

But is one person’s truth another’s lie? Is fake news a new idea, or has Trump just been better at exploiting the fragmentation of the media than other leaders?

When I started my career in communications back in the early 1990s my boss impressed upon me the importance of reading all 12 national newspapers in the UK if I wanted to get some idea of what the true story was – because every paper took a slightly different political slant. Understand the biases and intent behind the story, he said, don’t take it at face value.

Perhaps the difference back then was that we were trained to question the truth; whereas today too few people interrogate where their information is coming from – particularly if ‘a friend on Facebook’ appears to be the source.

Undoubtedly, today it’s harder to find opposite views to our own, to try and understand how the other side thinks. The algorithms driving media feeds give us more of the same, not different. We are being trained to see the world in black or white, not shades of grey or colour (unless it’s red or blue).

And with Deep Fake technology making it relatively easy to manipulate the moving image, it seems we now need to learn to question what we see, as well as what we read.

1.7 million people have watched the Deep Fake Queen's Christmas Message released in December by UK media outlet Channel Four. Yet only 141,000 to date have watched the making of video explaining why it was done – to create an important conversation around the potential dangers of this technology. Perhaps anticipating this, the main event starts off with ‘the Queen’ reinforcing that the key theme of her message is ‘trust…trust in what is genuine and what is not.’

So, with Deep Fake technologies, partisan politics and a pandemic-induced fear of others, will 2021 be the year that the truth dies?

I’m optimistic that won’t be the case. One positive side-effect of lockdowns has been to make us appreciate our local communities and real human connection more than ever. Let’s build on that to look for our shared truths, to seek out the shades of grey, and to always question the source.